Self awareness
What is the “self”? While most of us put some effort into making sure our externals are attractive – that we look good, that we can tempt the kind of partners we want – we also yearn to be seen as more than the packaging. Large-breasted women resent being looked at as a pair of boobs with a woman inconveniently attached. Successful men fear being viewed as walking wallets. “I want to be loved for myself, “ we wail.
And what if you feel like you’re loved because you’re highly intelligent, or extremely kind, or – in the BDSM world – a natural, brilliant dominant or submissive? Or because you write books? Does that feel like being loved for yourself? And if your intelligence or your generosity or your personality isn’t your “self,” what is your “self?
Excellent question! We wish we knew the answer. We suspect that the “self” is less a thing than a process, or a dynamic, or a permanently flowing sense of awareness. We sometimes wonder if the self lies one layer down under whatever layer it is that’s being seen at the time – that it exists mostly as a hunger to be revealed, to be known. Like all hungers, this one can be satiated only temporarily... but how wonderful it feels when it happens!
The moment when we feel like we’re being seen for our selves, when the barricades are down and the armor is off, is, of course, the moment of transcendence, the moment we have attempted to describe in this book. When it happens between two people, it feels a lot like love. In fact, we would argue, it is love, as Janet describes here:
We’d known each other for a while, enjoyed one another’s company. He’s smart and funny and so am I; he’s tall and broad, the way I like, with the softest blue eyes you ever saw. I’d been flirting with him for ages — well, I guess you’d call it flirting; I don’t do subtlety very well, so I guess what I mean by flirting is “So, hey, when are we gonna play?”
And then one day I got an e-mail: he wanted to, at the party coming up Saturday night. Yay! My gut started telling me right away that this playdate was more than just a playdate. The negotiations certainly didn’t predict anything special — the usual I like this; well, I don’t, much; OK, then, we won’t do it; oh, well, if you really want to we can. Our desires and fantasies overlapped to a reasonable degree, enough to fashion a pretty decent scene, but certainly not a perfect match.
We went to dinner, fine-tuned the negotiations, chatted. He’d worn a special outfit: leather cap and jacket, jeans that fit just the way they should, boots that added another two inches to his height, a cologne I actually liked (and as a rule I hate men’s scents). He looked big and tough, and yet there were still those eyes gazing out from under the leather brim of the cap...
I had actually bought an outfit — for some reason my usual butchish attire wasn’t right for this date. I bought heels, goddammit. I put on makeup. What was going on?
We got to the dungeon, grabbed my favorite cable-spool table with the padding and the eyebolts, started setting up the scene. He likes bondage, I don’t, so we compromised — my feet fastened firmly in place but my arms left free so I could stand or bend over. He asked if I liked blindfolds, I said I did; he slipped one on and I started to float. He pulled my tight spandex outfit down from the top and up from the bottom, turning it into a very tight wide stretchy belt. And then he held me from behind, letting me feel the thick leather of his jacket against my awakening skin, allowing me to trust his strength. My core started to soften, melting outward, bones blurring, blood warming.
He began to flog me, softly at first, building quickly — I’d told him I didn’t need too much warmup. Caress, caress, thwack, caress, thwack thwack. I began to make sounds, grunts and small moans. A heavier flogger now, more thud, more bite on the edges, hit me harder dammit I’m right on the edge... yes, like that, let me feel how hard you can hit, how much you’ve got in you, knock me over, let me catch myself so you can knock me over again, — or better yet you catch me.
And then suddenly a fit of giggles, contagious — what started it? Hell if I know, but I probably laughed first, you’re too polite to laugh when I’m working this hard, but you’re happy to let me take you flying with me in a gigglestorm, and I twist my neck back to look in your face and your eyes are crinkled up with pleasure and laughter; I can feel your chest shaking against me. And then the arms and chest are gone and thwack, and I pull myself back together and straighten up and brace myself for more, and the laughter’s made you even stronger, and you’re hitting me as hard as you can, and screams are pouring through the space the laughter opened up. And I start to bend over to hold the table for strength and you bark “Stand up straight!” and whatever last little bit of resistance I might have felt is gone, and I stand up straight, and my arms fly out to my sides, and no part of me is touching the earth any more: I’m airborne.
More, please, more. Three floggers held together at the handle and swung like a baseball bat, knocking me off balance, making me grab the table and brace myself because god knows I don’t want you to stop, this is too wonderful, you’re snapping yourself right down those big arms and those big floggers and pouring yourself right into my hot welted skin, into my simmering core, and the heat of the skin and the heat of the core meet up so I’m lava through and through, and the joy is just overpowering.
And just as you’ve landed the hardest blow and I’m teetering against the table you grab me, pull me upright, hold me so I don’t have to hold myself up any more, and I’m yours, completely yours, for just that moment — and I know that moment is permanent, that I’ll have it forever and just because of that I’ll have a little bit of you, forever.
… and after that same scene:
“Shhh... it’s all over now... it’s OK... it’s all over.”
That’s what he said to me after the scene, softly into my ear as he held me, after he’d reduced me to a screaming sobbing begging lump. And when I think back on the scene, that’s the moment I remember best, and with the greatest longing. Something in me has been waiting all my life to hear those words.
How often in life do we really get to know that the hard part is over? When we have a baby, one hard part is over when we push the new life out into the world — but there’s a couple of decades of even harder stuff lying ahead. Completing a task at work usually simply means clearing it off the desk to make room for the next one. Solving a problem generally creates a dozen more.
So for that one moment I get to be soothed, to be reminded that I’ve survived an impossible ordeal, and that I’m being rewarded with petting and affection and reassurance because I did it well, and it is all over. I can feel proud of myself and know that he recognizes how hard it was to do what I did.
And I also get to learn that bruised, beaten, snotty and hiccuping, all pretense gone and all defenses dropped, I’m still lovable: without any of the shows I put on to make myself attractive, someone still wants to comfort me and make me feel cared for and nurtured.
That moment, those words murmured into my ear so softly that I can barely hear them over my own sobs, feels a lot like love to me.
The unscratched itch
When we first started work on this book, we were both fairly recently out of relationships that neither of us would hesitate to call “failed” – both feeling raw, bitter and very uncertain about our possibilities for ever getting involved again. Although things have improved quite a bit since then, those dark days did lead to some interesting – if uncheerful – thoughts about the nature of loneliness, especially for those of us who like our sex and play very, very intimate. It was during such a period that Janet wrote:
Is a sadomasochist who hasn’t gotten to play for a while “impervious”?
Sure, I can make puns about it, but it really isn’t funny. I’ve been snappish for days. Everything I think of annoys me; there’s no calm place for my mind to rest. I miss people who are gone and resent people who are here. I can’t think of what I want to eat or what I feel like doing. My reflection in the mirror looks ugly.
Nobody can t
ell there’s anything wrong: I’m socializing as merrily as ever — but by the time I get back to my car I feel frantic, sorry to have left but desperate to get away, utterly unable to conceive how to stand going home by myself but unable to tolerate anyone else’s company for another minute.
I run through my mental checklist of what could be eating me. No, I’m not premenstrual. Hmm. I’ve gotten plenty of exercise in the last couple of days, and I’ve been eating OK if not with wild enthusiasm. No changes in medication, no broken sleep, no fights with friends or business troubles.
Well, that’s not it — so what the hell do I want?
A thought comes to me suddenly and forcefully, and I begin to cry, alone in my car. I want to be touched. Not just with physical touch, I get plenty of that. I want someone inside my skin, or I want to get inside someone else’s skin. I want to feel that sensation of wanting to devour someone entirely, to erase the air between us so there’s a perfect synergy of minds, hearts, bodies. I want to connect. And the best way I know to do that is with SM.
This restless flame inside me seeks to join with someone else’s flame, to leap toward the sky together. It’s happened in various ways throughout my life. Sometimes during long intense intellectual conversations, the ones where it feels like our minds are two horses yoked to the same chariot, pulling together to go someplace neither could go alone. In tantra practice, when I gaze into someone’s eyes and feel myself falling into her pupils, plummeting inward, a tiny me reflected in her eyes, a tiny her reflected in mine. Occasionally during bouts of uncontrollable laughter, where your face hurts and your stomach aches and it doesn’t feel like you’ll ever stop, because as soon as you slow down, you look at the other person and it all starts again.
But mostly, I go there in scene. And I haven’t played in a long time, and I haven’t gone there in even longer, and it hurts.
And I drive on, and I wonder if these tough boundaries I’ve built with such effort and pain have finally fenced me off completely from everyone I love and everything I enjoy, and I cry.
Scientists describe a basic animal need called “touch-hunger” : babies who aren’t given plenty of physical touch wither away, just as they would if they weren’t given enough food. We think there is a subtler but just as real need to be touched at an energetic or spiritual level. Clearly, this spiritual touch-starvation feels very awful indeed – so bad that we may wind up opting for self-destructive behaviors (bad drugs, bad partners, bad behavior of various kinds) rather than feeling it a moment longer. One of the reasons we wanted to research and write this book is to help make sure that nobody has to feel this awful feeling any more than absolutely necessary – that everybody has as many tools as possible to make connections with the universe and the people around them when they need to.
The masks of love
There is another way in which love seems to manifest, a way that has drawn each of us in on more than one occasion. That naked raw hungry self, the one that yearns to be seen – what’s the easiest pathway to it? Through the weak spots, of course – through our frayed places, our places of vulnerability, our wounds. So when an attractive stranger comes along and puts his or her mouth right up to one of those wounds and speaks into it the way an announcer speaks into a microphone, it can feel a whole lot like being truly seen, like a promise of real satisfaction for the hunger that’s gone unfulfilled for what seems like forever. Unfortunately, what’s being seen isn’t the whole us; it’s our weakest, neediest selves, the least acknowledged parts of ourselves, that are on display. But since those aren’t the parts of ourselves that we normally spend much time with, we can easily mistake them for the whole thing – not noticing the mistake until there are two names on top of the joint checking account or the birth certificate.
Janet writes:
Crazy In Love
I’ve only been searingly, impossibly in love twice in my adult life — once with someone who loved me back, the other with someone who didn’t. The second one did me the bigger favor.
This kind of love is a kind of craziness, a delusional state with obsessive-compulsive overtones. It bypasses rational thought and self-preservation. The only experience I’ve had that came close to it was the feeling I had about my kids when they were tiny infants — completely occupied with them, endlessly fascinated by them, not sure where they ended and I began, wanting nothing more than to curl up around them and shelter them forever and ever.
For me, crazy-in-love manifests as mad protectiveness, the complete conviction that I and I alone can see this person’s inner beauty, and the certainty that I’m strong enough and good enough to make them happy. Believing I can do that, that I’m that strong and competent and empathetic and intuitive, makes me feel immensely powerful. This is, of course, megalomaniacal and delusional, but just try telling me that when I’m tossing and turning because my skin won’t be calm unless it’s touching that person.
Why is it that the people who activate my worst instincts — egoism, martyrdom, manipulativeness — are the ones I fall in love with? Not coincidence, surely. There must be a part of me that longs to feel those things and leaps at the opportunity to inflict them on someone else. And the worst part is this: even as I work to build boundaries, to leave those behaviors behind, I know that if another one came along — someone who’s tough yet needy, unpredictable, irascible, very smart but a little bit nuts — I’d do it all over again.
No, wait, that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that I want to.
This is scary truth: that we can’t depend on our lovers to prove to us that we’re not broken because actually, in some ways, we are. Wounded, anyway.
And if you’re feeling scared, or upset, or worried about this, or about anything we’ve presented here: back to the breath. Remember about self-acceptance and being kind to yourself. Take another breath. Always return to the breath.
Learning how
Opening yourself up to connection is not a skill that most of us have automatically. Babies and very small children have it, but it gets schooled out of most of us early on, when we’re taught to restrain our emotions and behave ourselves. These are important skills in terms of learning to get on with others, but they require closing yourself off, putting up filters between yourself and the world. Later, when you want to learn to make intimate connection, you have to learn all over again how to drop those filters – and it’s not always easy.
Hardly anybody gets relationships right the first time, or the second, or the nineteenth – in fact, we have a big question about whether it’s possible to get relationships “right” at all, or whether we just do the best we can with the cards we’re dealt at the time. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to grow together and take care of each other as well as we can – to see each other and touch each other and try not to harm what we see and touch. Perhaps that’s not such a small thing – perhaps that’s one of the biggest tasks we face on this earth.
Here’s a relevant exercise we learned in tantra. If an exercise seems weird in the midst of all this cogitation, that’s really what this book is about: to show you a lot of the ways that have worked for us to open a path to connection.
Sit across from a friend or a lover, and gaze into his or her eyes. Breathe together for a moment. Imagine that you can see so deeply that you can see your beloved before they were ever wounded. Innocent, clean, unafraid, sacred. And remember, your beloved is seeing you the same way.
Imagine you could make love from this place. Any kind of love that fits. Maybe gazing like this is making love.
The reality is that there are as many ways to touch, as many ways to love, as there are combinations of people and circumstances – which is to say, an infinite number. The trick, we find, is to remain open to the moments and the dear people in them when they present themselves — there’s presence and acceptance again – to welcome the moments in which all the love in the world presents itself to us with a human face for a little while. When we treasure each connection for w
hat it is... not what it might become, or what we might make of it... when we simply cherish that dear person in front of us, perhaps we might still be cherishing tomorrow.
Putting it all together
To close this chapter, we’d like to recount in both of our voices an evening that we spent combining what we know of tantra and SM to achieve mutual ecstasy. Dossie is in the plain text and Janet in the italics:
We are having a date at my house in the country. We’ve spent the afternoon with the outline of this book you are reading. Janet has brilliantly organized all the scattered bits and pieces, and the evening is set aside for play by the fireplace. The feeling is good and easy and connected, and the dog is happy.
We negotiate the scene before dinner, which is a little complicated —Janet has a couple of clear fantasies, and I’d like to be able to fit into them. She’s hungry for spanking and viciousness, imagines a teenage boy who comes home to find the babysitter smoking weed and blackmails her into sex. I had been wanting to do a scene starting out with tantric breathing and raising the energy, making the energetic connection. Last time we did this I was the top, and tonight I have eyes to bottom for it. I had just topped the scene in this book about trance dancing with the cane, and I really wanted that for myself. There’s a little fumbling around — can we script a scene that includes both of our desires?
I’ve been carrying around a lot of stress and frustration, and I haven’t had the chance to do much intense play in quite a while. Typically for me, this situation has built up into some very nasty fantasies. There’s a playstyle that I love topping and often enjoy bottoming to, but not too many bottoms meet me with it — a no-holds-barred, harsh, punitive kind of play. Of course, it has connection built into it, but not overtly, and it looks pretty scary from the outside. I’d been hoping for such a scene that night. Dossie can sometimes go there with me, but not always; I have my fingers crossed...
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